In our 2014 article, ‘Critical pedagogy for social change’ (Ruggunan
& Spiller 2014), I reflect on my journey from being an academic in a department of industrial psychology to being an academic in a department of human resources, albeit at the same university.
I moved across disciplines in 2011 because funding decisions regarding my university’s College of Humanities (where industrial sociology was located) left the College with limited resources. At the end of 2010, I was one of two permanent staff members in the programme for industrial sociology. This became an untenable position to work in, given that the Department originally consisted of seven permanent staff members. A post had opened up in the discipline of human resources management in the College of Law and Management on another campus of my University, and I decided to apply for it. At the time, I never considered myself a serious candidate, given the vastly different epistemic approaches between industrial sociology and management studies in South Africa. I remember thinking, ‘Why would a management school hire an industrial sociologist, especially one whose work has been pro labour and implicitly anti-managerialist?’
I was therefore surprised to be shortlisted and subsequently appointed as a senior lecturer in the discipline of human resources management in the College of Law and Management Studies in 2011. The cross-pollination of social scientists from colleges of social sciences and colleges of humanities with those from business or commerce schools in the United Kingdom has been documented by critical management scholars like Grey and Wilmott (2005). As South Africa emulates the same form of new managerialism at our universities, it seems that many social-science academics have to find new disciplinary homes, many of which will be in business schools.
Houghton and Bass (2012) are one of the first publications about this phenomenon that is gathering pace in the South African context.
Their article, ‘Routes through the academy: Critical reflections on the experiences of young geographers in South Africa’, further captures my frustrations about the commodification of South African education along a Thatcherite path. The article points out how South African academics, from sociologists to geographers, have to retool and explore new disciplinary paths and career routes in the academy.
These are important interventions in understanding the politics and practices of knowledge production beyond the Anglo-American core (Hammet & Hoogendoorn 2012).
However, I would argue that it may also represent a moment of opportunity and resistance for those of us who are advocates and practitioners of a critical management studies in South Africa. It provides an opportunity to spread ideas into knowledge-production spaces to which we may not have had access otherwise. It is also a double act of emancipation and resistance to stay within the academy as CMS advocate (albeit in a different disciplinary home) rather than leave the academy altogether. If an unintended (some would say intentional) consequence of the neoliberal commodification of universities globally is the erosion of critique from public intellectuals in the social sciences and the humanities by making work in these areas insecure, that critique can reform and be articulated from new disciplinary spaces such as schools of management studies. It also opens up a space for broader reflexive debates on the intellectual project of specific disciplines, whether these be geography, accounting, management studies or medicine.
I found my new disciplinary home better resourced and better staffed. This increased the time available to me to more deeply reflect
on my new role as a HRM academic. Was I to be, as Klikauer (2015) contends, an accomplice to neo-liberal capitalism or was there space for me to become an agent of change through reflecting on the values underlying society? This dissonance generated much discomfit and introspection in me during 2011. It produced a state of what I term vulnerability. I contend that vulnerability is part of the critical self-reflexive process of CMS. As the literature indicates, the flipside of vulnerability is creativity (Akinola & Mendes 2008;
Brown 2012a, 2012b). Vulnerability produces a disruption, a destabilisation of existing pedagogical and disciplinary knowledge.
I was deeply aware, as Nkomo (2011) observes in her account of moving from the USA to a South African department of human resources, that the Anglo-American epistemological paradigm was dominant. This was reflected in the types of textbook prescribed to students and the types of topic explored in various modules. Where South African texts were used, they reflected the main centres of HR knowledge production, that is, the formerly Afrikaner universities. However, apart from the affiliation of authors of textbooks, the narrative of the discipline of HRM was a predominantly managerialist and positivist one. We were, as averred to earlier in Chapter 4, caught in a double colonial bind, an Anglo-Saxon-Afrikaner nationalist nexus.
The geography of the UKZN as a multiple-campus institution means that HRM students cannot easily choose electives or majors in philosophy, sociology, psychology or other modules outside of the College at which they were enrolled. Apart from curricular restrictions, they would have to travel 11 kilometres to a separate campus to attend lectures there and then travel back to their
home campuses. The multi-campus model means that certain colleges have specific geographic homes. Thus commerce studies are situated at Westville Campus and social-science and humanities studies are situated at the Howard College Campus in Glenwood.
One impact of this is that curriculum development happens in isolation, and there is very little opportunity for interdisciplinary work across colleges. I therefore arrived to very insular curricula being offered in the curriculum for human resources management.
This contributed to my vulnerability as I felt that I had to retool extensively and ‘forget’ my industrial-sociology training. Whilst there were synergies between industrial sociology and human resources management, the former was very labourist and the latter very managerialist. This dissonance and vulnerability allowed me to discover the CMS literature and embark on a historiography of HRM (still a work in progress) in South Africa. It was an empowering experience that led me to examine the content, message and values of the HRM modules I was teaching. I was also wary of one of the pitfalls of CMS practitioners as articulated by Grey et al. (2016), namely that one can be condescending of the voices and practices of other academics in the discipline.
Vulnerability also means letting go of ‘the ego of expertise’. It involves a questioning of one’s role as the expert (even when that expertise is a CMS expertise!). The year 2011 was therefore one of relocation, dislocation, vulnerability (and its flip side, creativity) and conscientisation. It was at the end of academic year in 2011 that I thought it prudent to hear from other voices within the HR academy and student body at UKZN and began writing a proposal to fund a project on critical management studies. I found the
university teaching and learning office (UTLO) and my colleagues within my HRM discipline very supportive of my proposal. Perhaps this is an anomalous experience, but I found a cohort of colleagues who were supportive, and my proposal was funded for a period of two years. This once again speaks of the ability to craft critical spaces in neoliberal or managerialist universities (as is the identity of most universities globally and in South Africa). The support could further be explained by a UTLO cohort of staff that are sympathetic ideologically to critical theory and its application to management studies. The support offered to CMS scholars may differ greatly, depending on the organisational culture of the university in which he or she practises. Thus, my experience may not be one that is enjoyed nationally. However, as this book project demonstrates, such support is gaining momentum.